Rotten (9780545495899) Read online

  “He’s a little” — I can’t think of the word, and I need it fast — “skittish, is all.”

  She stops and looks up at me.

  “Why’s that, now?” she says. The half smile turns into half a frown and you can tell she thinks that maybe it’s because of me. Whatever, I’ve got her answer.

  “He’s a rescue,” I say.

  “Oh,” she says.

  “Oh,” says her husband.

  They both look at him again, but this time they really see him: his eyes wide open, afraid or angry or both, his legs bending back away from them. Mrs. F. takes a step back.

  “That’s awful,” she says, “that someone would treat a nice dog like that.”

  “What did they do to him? Was he a fighting dog?” says Mr. F. “Sort of looks like a fighting dog.”

  “Nah,” I say. “Chained him up, beat him.”

  I don’t know if that second part is true, but I point to the messed-up patch of fur.

  “Ticks,” I say.

  “Shameful,” says Mrs. F.

  “Did anything happen to that jerk?” says Mr. F.

  “No,” I say, “but we’re going to look for him now.”

  They think that’s pretty funny and step aside.

  “Well, we hope you find him!” says Mrs. F.

  Twenty yards later, JR is back to sniffing the ground and looking for squirrels.

  “Good-bye, Johnny!” Mrs. F calls out behind us.

  He lifts his head and looks back.

  “I’m taking a real chance being out here with public enemy number one,” I say to him.

  His eyes flick up at me.

  “But you did good,” I say. “Yeah, met three people today and only bit one. Think you may have a Nobel Peace Prize coming your way. Or a Nobel Beast Prize any —”

  And then something moves in the bushes, and it’s like nothing else exists in his world. Again I’m thinking: dumb as a post or super Zen? I give him a little extra leash, and he charges forward and scares the heck out of some sort of small bird, not a sparrow, but about that size. He watches it fly away and then goes back to sniffing the damp ground.

  “What are you even going to smell after all that rain?” I say to him. He doesn’t look up this time. He’s caught scent of something. Shows what I know.

  When we get home, JR goes to his corner and I go to the front room and take out my phone.

  hey man! hope the hand is ok! sorry about that. dog is still a little weird w/ people — but hey at least he’s got good taste :o srsly, sorry. let me know u r ok!

  I look it over again and hit send. I think it’s pretty good. I said sorry twice, made a lame joke, and didn’t use any capital letters because Mars never does. Now I want a quick text back: am fine, thx 4 help or no prob. my fault would be ideal, but I’ll settle for im ok screw u. Instead, I get nothing. The phone just sits there. I turn on the TV, and I just sit there, too.

  Mom gets home a little early and is flapping around the house in crisis mode. “No one came by, did they?” she asks, midflap.

  “No,” I say. “Who would’ve?”

  “No one,” she says.

  It’s pretty obvious that there’s something she’s not telling me, so I have two choices: try to pry it out of her or maintain the committed ignorance-is-bliss mind-set that has gotten me so far in life. I don’t pry, and she settles down after a while. There’s not really anything she can do. She hasn’t heard back from Mrs. DiMartino or the hospital, and I haven’t heard back from Mars.

  She’s still wound up, though, and decides to take JR for a walk. It turns out he’s exactly the same way with walks as he is with biscuits: He could’ve had one a minute before and you’d never know. Mom gets the leash and he gets up and starts twitching around in excitement, and it’s like, Dude! We just went all the way to the frickin’ pond and back, remember? You met Mr. and Mrs. Windbreaker and won the Nobel Beast Prize? But, nope, it’s like he’s never been out of the house before.

  “You let him out today, right?” says Mom. “I mean, after the thing?”

  The thing … Is that what she’s going to call it?

  “Yeah,” I say. “I walked him halfway to Brantley!”

  We both look at Johnny, and he gives us this wide-eyed whome? look. And now Mom is thinking the same thing as me: dumb as a post with the memory of a goldfish, or a smooth operator who’s got us right where he wants us? I feel like the evidence is shifting in his favor. Anyway, out they go, and I start to wonder when or if I’m going to get dinner.

  I nuke some pizza rolls to hold me over, and it sort of feels weird to eat them all myself. I think about texting Mars again, but the ball is definitely in his court. The rules of the game are: If you hit it twice in a row, you lose. Mom comes home a half hour later and makes us macaroni and cheese.

  I spend a long time online after that. I don’t even know why I’m doing it until Janie’s name pops up with the little green dot next to it — available to chat — and then it’s like, Yep, that’s why I’m here.

  The room has gotten dark by now, so I sit there lit up by the computer screen and think about it. The ball is 100 percent in her court, too, but this game feels different. For one thing, it’s been going on a lot longer. For another, I already feel like a loser. I remember the bike ride, the stupid hair gel, and her father, the prince of darkness, filling up the door frame.

  Hey, I type.

  Then I wait.

  I wait my loser wait.

  I sort of need her to reply. This day has kicked my butt and I need something good to happen. But I can’t make it happen. I can’t hit the same ball three times. That’s pretty much unprecedented in human and tennis history.

  I get up and turn on the light.

  I sit back down.

  I wait some more.

  Hey, she types.

  Now I’m like: What next? I’m trying to think of something funny or clever or at least not idiotic or pathetic, but she is typing again.

  Heard you stopped by …

  Didn’t think he’d tell you!

  She doesn’t reply immediately, so I have time to reread my response about eight times. Was that pathetic? It was supposed to be a joke. Sort of. Maybe the exclamation point was too much?

  She’s typing: I probably shouldn’t tell you haw he phrased it!

  I read it twice. There’s a typo and an exclamation point, and it’s a joke. Sort of. It is the best response anyone has ever written in the history of online chats! And then I remember that I might be mad at her, and she is 100 percent on record as being mad at me.

  Ha! I type, just to type something.

  Then I type: Were you home?

  I look at it. Delete it.

  I’m back.

  But she knows that already. Delete it.

  How have you been?

  Delete it.

  I got a dog.

  Send.

  cool.

  He’s a rottweiler.

  excellent

  I’m waiting for her to ask me his name. She’s not into punk rock or metal or anything like that. Just to be totally honest, she’s one of those people who, if you said, “Music sucks right now,” she would say, “What do you mean? What about sucky band X or sucky band Y?” But I still think she’ll like the name. The other possibility is that she’ll think it’s mean. She’s a lot nicer than I am.

  He bit Mars :o

  Delete it.

  Her name pops up: Gotta go!

  We must have been typing at the same time. And just like that, she’s off-line. Unless her house is on fire or something, she chat–hung up on me. It sort of stings, but then I read back through and it doesn’t seem so bad. She hit the ball back, maybe not directly into my court but at least in my general direction.

  Anyway, it’s amazing how easy it is to think of things to say now that she’s off-line. I type out a long paragraph to her. I just kind of put it all out there. I think it’s pretty good, all things considered. I read it over again. Delete it.


  I barely sleep at all. I’ve been having trouble sleeping for a while now, but this one is bad even for me. By the time the phone rings at a little after seven on Friday morning, I’ve already been awake for hours. I think maybe I’ve been waiting for it.

  Phone calls that come in very late or very early are pretty much always bad news. I get up and grab the closest, easiest things, the old sweatpants I was wearing last night and my battered NOFX T-shirt. Then I head for the stairs, moving in full spy mode. I sit down a few steps from the bottom. The phone in the hall is just around the corner from there, and my mom is already talking.

  “Yes, Helen,” she says.

  Helen DiMartino.

  “No, Helen.”

  I wonder if there’s some reason she keeps saying her first name, like it’s something she learned in one of her corporate seminars about Empowerment or Salesmanship or Dealing with Psychobilly Rednecks.

  “I told you this yesterday … Yes … All of them. All of them and then some.”

  Mom listens for a while. Mrs. DiMartino is talking so loud that I can hear little bits of her voice all the way over here, but I can’t make out what she’s saying. She sounds like bees buzzing.

  “No, absolutely not. Completely healthy. None of those things. He spent nearly a month at the vet’s.”

  And now I know what they’re talking about.

  “Dr. Sanderson … Yes, Helen, I gave you the number…. No, absolutely not.”

  Her voice is getting more strained. Maybe it’s what Mrs. DiMartino is saying or maybe it’s just because she’s been shouting in Mom’s ear the whole time. Either way, the morning fog is starting to clear out of my head, and two things are pretty clear: 1) They want her to take JR to the vet to have him tested to see if he might’ve given Mars anything. Despite what Mom is saying — “completely healthy” and all that — I can’t help thinking of all those old tick bites; 2) Mom doesn’t want to take him there.

  I don’t want her to, either. It’s not because of the tests, which would mean maybe drawing some blood. I can’t imagine that would be a smooth process with JR, but I’m sure they have ways of getting it done. Maybe they’d drug him. A line pops into my head: “I wanna be sedated!” But that makes me think of what else they do at the vet’s, the kind of sedation dogs don’t wake up from.

  By the time I tune back in to the phone call, Mom is saying, “Good-bye, Helen,” and hanging up.

  I hear her coming this way. I’m not sure if I should stand up or what, so I stay where I am. She jumps about three feet in the air when she sees me.

  “Jesus, Jimmer!” she says. “You scared me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t do that to me before I’ve had my coffee,” she says, and then her tone shifts. “Did you hear?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “They should test Mars. See if he gave JR anything.”

  “I know,” she says. “Go back to bed.”

  She heads off to the kitchen to get her coffee, and I head back upstairs. I try to go back to sleep for a while, but it’s even more useless now than it was before the phone rang. I get up and get dressed. I get my best bad jeans and my black boots. I want to be ready in case I need to do something. I don’t know what that would be, but that’s why I want to be ready. I stick with the same T-shirt, though, because it’s all-purpose.

  As I’m putting on my second boot, I hear a car door slam, then a second one. I clomp over to the window, wearing one boot and holding the other, in time to see Mom backing out of the driveway. Oh crap. I rush downstairs, but the house is empty: no Mom, and no dog. It’s just me, standing there in the living room with a boot in my hand.

  Eventually, I make my way to the kitchen. There’s a note on the refrigerator, but I already know what it’s going to say. I pour myself some cereal, eat most of it, and sit there smashing the rest of it with my spoon. I’ve got the remains pulped and spread out over the surface like sugary pond scum when someone knocks on the door. If I were more alert, I’d be the one jumping three feet. As it is, I just look up. It’s Rudy. He gives me a look through the glass like, You gonna open this?

  Rudy is like a vampire: He’ll only come in if he’s invited. I think it’s because his dad “values his privacy.” Whenever I’m over there, we’re always extra careful about knocking so we never have to find out what he’s hiding. Whatever it is, I wave him in.

  “You look like hell,” he says.

  “Thanks,” I say. “Want the rest of my cereal?”

  He looks into the bowl. “Nasty,” he says. “Where’s Killer?”

  “Don’t call him that.”

  “Sorry, just kidding.”

  “At the vet’s.”

  “Damn … They’re not …”

  “I don’t think so, just tests.”

  “Oh.”

  “To make sure Mars didn’t give him anything.”

  Rudy laughs a little. “He’s probably in the clear,” he says. “Pretty sure Mars can’t catch sexually transmitted diseases from himself.”

  Now I laugh, mostly out of relief. That joke is Rudy’s way of saying, I’m on your side, not his.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “No problem,” he says, but I’m not sure he really understands why I said it. “Anyway, I gotta hit the road. I’m picking up some extra money downtown. They need some muscle for the weekend deliveries at the market.”

  “They need some cheap labor, more like,” I say.

  “Can we agree on cheap muscle?”

  “Small muscle, maybe.”

  “Don’t be after any of my sweet, sweet spending money, then.”

  “All right, just try not to leave it out where I can see it,” I say. “Hey …”

  “Yeah?”

  “What time you gonna be done?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Afternoon.”

  “Stop by, all right? We’ll hang with Killer.”

  If JR comes back — it just pops into my head, but I pop it right back out.

  “Cool,” says Rudy.

  He leaves and I dump out my cereal and go back to waiting.

  I hear three taps on the glass of the front door: Tik. Tik. Tik. It’s kind of a spooky sound, nails on glass, and even though I basically know it’s Rudy before I turn around, there’s still something creepy about turning around to see who’s tapping their fingernails on the glass behind you.

  “Why didn’t you just knock?” I say, opening the door.

  “My knuckles are too powerful,” he says. “I’d blow out the glass, probably kill a bunch of people.”

  “There’s only one people here,” I say. It’s a little goofy, but I’m in a good mood. Mom came back around ten thirty this morning and JR came back with her, looking a bit spooked maybe, but not drugged up or, you know, dead. As soon as I saw them, I let out a breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding in.

  Mom had to head straight into work, already seriously late, so she couldn’t really talk about the whats or whys of the trip. Since then JR and I have just been chilling out in the house. Before Rudy showed up, I was sitting here trying to think why I was so worried about this dog. I don’t mean what I thought might happen at the vet’s. You hear about that stuff all the time: Some big dog bites someone or goes after a poodle and has to be put to sleep. And in pretty much every movie or book I know of where there’s a chance a dog will be put to sleep, that’s exactly what happens. No, I mean, why do I care so much?

  JR isn’t even technically my dog. He’s half my dog, and it wasn’t that long ago that he felt like even less than that. But now that he’s in trouble? Now that he gets taken away first thing in the morning and I don’t even know if he’s coming back? Now he feels like my dog. Because I know what that feels like. He’s had it tough, and he didn’t mean it anyway, and no one really has a clue about him. So, yeah. Sounds like my dog to me.

  “Can I pet him?” says Rudy.

  JR is standing a few feet away and seems calm enough, but it’s still a good question.
Rudy is wearing a long-sleeve T-shirt, which has a saying I probably shouldn’t repeat and an arrow pointing down, so I say: “Put your sleeve over your hand. Just pull it down a little.”

  I sort of mime what I mean, and he does it.

  “I feel like a lion tamer,” he says.

  He takes a step, reaches over, and pets JR. His hand is clenched up to hold the sleeve in place, so all he can do is push it around the top of JR’s head. JR ducks down a little at first, but he doesn’t move away, doesn’t sever Rudy’s hand at the wrist, and more or less acts like any other skittish, antisocial, punk rock dog would. After a few circular motions, Rudy removes his hand, JR lifts his head, and life goes on.

  “Cool,” he says. “I thought he didn’t trust dudes?”

  “I think he can tell we’re not, like, adults.”

  “That’s kind of insulting,” says Rudy. “But I guess it’s true. At least for you.”

  “Yeah, he should be a bartender. He’d just eat the fake IDs.”

  “He’s a lot friendlier than last time anyway.”

  “Depends,” I say.

  “Yeah, seriously,” he says. “You heard anything from Mars?”

  “No, and I texted him yesterday. It seriously was not that bad!”

  “Yeah, he’s a drama queen.”

  “I just hope he doesn’t cause too much trouble. I have to deal with it, either way. Maybe I’ll try him again later. It’s a new day, I guess.”

  “Let me try him,” says Rudy, and I immediately realize that’s the way to go.

  “Yeah, yeah!” I say. “Just ask him if he’s OK. And maybe ask it in a way that he’d be a total wuss if he said no.”

  “Think I should call, then, or text?”

  “Either way,” I say. A text is good because I could show people the reply, but a call is OK too, because Rudy is, like, a semi-impartial witness.

  “Right now?”

  “No, wait, let me think about this for a minute,” I say.

  It feels like maybe there’s some sort of strategy or trick I could use. I try to think about it but nothing is coming to me. What would they do to Mars in a movie? Shoot him. That doesn’t help.